Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [105]
Not that you ever expressed even the slightest bit of jealousy over this one-night stand, but I was tempted to defend myself here, and claim that this traumatizing lay had not occurred “during.” But I can’t really say that, because even when we hadn’t spoken to each other for months, then years, and hadn’t communicated at all beyond those one-word postcards (when will FOREVER come?), you never officially broke up with me. Nor I with you. And those notebooks, oh, those stolen notebooks I’ll never read, serve, even in absentia, as more than adequate proof that you never stopped thinking about me during those years apart. And I can just come right out and say that I never stopped thinking about you, either. And if I’m being completely honest, I’ll confess that I thought about you that very night as I writhed on top of Len. I thought about you when I was fucking him, as I thought about you every single time I fucked that assclown Kieran during our intense and unhealthy four-month sham of a relationship. I thought about you if only because I wondered how long it would take me to stop thinking about you. I thought about you, and how I might never be able to forgive you for all the girls who came before me, nor myself for all the men who would come after you.
But that’s the trouble. My indiscretion with Len did indeed take place “during.” It had to, because there was never any “after.”
“During? His best friend?” Dexy wriggled one eyebrow, then the other, and slapped me on the back in congratulations. “You are a slut!” Then before I could say anything else, she held up a white plastic supermarket shopping bag with the words THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU printed on it in red letters, through which I could see the muted greens and blues of the outfit she had brought for me.
“Idiot,” Manda muttered to her phone. She angrily thumbed a response, then stomped down the hall to her bedroom. Before she reached the door, she shouted over her shoulder, “Hope hasn’t been here in two days! And Ursula wants your hundred sixty-six thirty-three!” Then she slammed the door so hard that I could hear her framed vintage Guerrilla Girls poster falling off the wall and crashing to the floor.
And before I could express my concern regarding either of these updates, Dexy took me by the shoulders and steered me toward the Cupcake.
“Come on, slut, let’s get you dressed!”
sixty-two
Dexy looooooooooves the Cupcake.
“It’s adorable!” she gushed as she plugged her pink iPod into my speakers. “It must be, like, a nonstop slumber party!”
“Not lately,” I said hesitantly. “Hope and I are sort of, I don’t know, but I think we might be in a bit of a fight. Or something.”
“Color me shocked! Shocked.” Dexy gasped dramatically. “What happened? Is that why she’s disappeared? Where do you think she is?”
“Probably at the studio preparing for her show tomorrow night.”
“What might you be, I don’t know, sort of in a bit of a fight over?” she asked, mimicking my indecisive language.
And then I told her, in as few words as possible, and with little embroidery or embellishment, all about the shared confidences between you and Hope. And to be honest, as I was telling her, the story already seemed like the organic yogurt, well past its expiration date. It all seemed so long ago.
Dexy listened with rapt attention. And when I finished, she was quiet for a second as she scanned through the catalog of songs stuck in her brain. Then she opened her mouth and started rapping, which you might think would be less devastating to the auditory canal because of the absence of actual notes, but this performance was somehow even worse than her singing. Then again, not even the originators could pull off those lyrics:
“Cats brawling with them claws out/Bitch YUB Trippin’?/I’m balling with my balls out/Bitch YUB Trippin’?”
Even with the inclusion of the title, I still (barely) recognized this as “Bitch (YUB Trippin’?),” dismal bad-boy-band Hum-V’s biggest hit, the video in which model/actress/video